Mortality
by HappierThanMost
Summary: Pony's grief has him wrestling with mortality


**MORTALITY**

Maybe I hadn't wanted to believe it, but it took me awhile before I realized everybody gets old. Once that icy fact sunk in deep enough to crack and splinter my eight year old stomach, I immediately thought of my parents with alarm. At thirty-something, they were the oldest people I knew, that is, of the people that I loved, and I couldn't imagine them with gray hair or feeble bones, with cloudy eyes or skin like crepe paper.

My mother wore a cold cream mask every night before bed. She haunted the dark hall with a white pasty face and two black holes where her eyes peered through, tossing our laundry and complaining about our messes. Soda and Darry called her the laundry ghost, but only when she was out of ear shot, when her head was bent down deep inside the washer to pull out whatever we'd left inside our pockets.

"Why do you wear that goop anyway?" I asked her once, as she stood at the sink to wipe it off with a wet rag, warm like she was.

"Oh Pony," and her shoulders slumped in her bathrobe, as if she knew her answer was gonna sound dumb, "it's every woman's desperate attempt at the fountain of youth." When she could tell I wasn't quite getting it, she lamely added, "It's so I can keep my skin lookin young…or somethin like that." She stared at herself real hard in the mirror then, until Dad came in to brush his teeth and add his two cents.

Gently, he shoved me off to the side to take his place next to her. "Boy, your Momma's skin's still as smooth as the day I met her, back when she was nothin' but eighteen and a day." And then to her, "Not a hide nor hair of no wrinkles babe." Her waist looked smaller with his brown hand wrapping it, his arm branded by her name.

And I watched my mother's smile give way to all the creases she wore along her eyes, the ones that only branched deeper with her happiness, and I had to wonder if my dad's vision was shot, or he was lying through his Colgate teeth. But it didn't matter, cause those laughing lines were my favorite part about her.

And now she's gone. And I close my photo album and remember how I could never imagine Mom and Dad as old, and I'm suddenly realizing I wasn't able to, because it was never meant to be.

I swallow hard with the weight of my possible premonition. Predicting the future might be cool, might even come in handy for a few things, but who'd want that kind of power with all the grave responsibilities that would bring? Who wants to jump to the last line of the book and know how the story ends? Not me. And I sure wouldn't want to know how life's gonna go before it happens either. Unless I could do something about it.

And that thought ignites a fire, and it burns and races and sets off another blaze in my gut and another in my lungs until it chokes my windpipe. What if I had the capability to save my parents that night had I known? Wait, did I know? If only I could've made them stay home.

"Earth to Ponyboy," Soda's standing sideways at my door, flicking my light switch up and down so that my room flashes like a strobe.

I squint and watch the outline of his image shift from dark to light, back and forth in rapid pulses. "Damn, Soda, could you be more annoying?"

"Yeah Pony, I could." At least he's being honest, and he's stopped blinding me and leans against the door frame instead, tapping it. "Darry's out there raising Cain. Says you was s'posed to be asleep thirty minutes ago." I can't hide my glare from this rude interruption, and Soda throws his arms up like he's at a loss. "Look, I'm just tryin' to keep him from comin' in here and bitchin' you out." And Soda knows how to make his voice as firm as Darry's when he says, "So c'mon now Ponyboy. I mean it. Call it a night."

I appreciate him playing buffer between Darry and me, but whenever he turns on me and talks that way, he's a traitor as far as I'm concerned. Whose side is he really on? And besides, I know why they both want me to go to bed. So they can sit around and talk trash like they used to, so they can joke with each other, toss back some of Dad's whiskey and make believe I don't exist. So they can forget about me dragging them down for maybe just a little while.

I think about yelling out all of this, every single bit and at the top of my lungs too, but somehow Soda trained me good along the way, and I'd rather go to bed than make him mad or disappointed. With a thread of leftover pride, I tell him simply, "Get out."

But I take off my shirt and jeans and climb into my cold sheets before he closes the door with a satisfied but soft, "G'night Po'boy."

And lying down, the panic shoots off again, right where I'd left it waiting, and I start thinking of all the ways I could've steered the events of that day to a different outcome. One second here and a second there could've added up and maybe they wouldn't have been at that intersection, not at that green light at that time of day.

I hear Darry and Soda cutting up out there in front of the TV. I blink once at the ceiling and decide to not blink again. And you know what, thinking of all the changes I would make if I somehow could go back, maybe I'd just get in the car with my parents. And die too. I keep my eyes open, even while the watering can't keep them from drying out, and I pretend I'm a corpse. My breath is stilled. My pulse yells back at me, pounding in my ears. I work to ignore it.

One day I'll be dead too. My stomach fights the lack of oxygen with a sporadic jerk. Everybody dies. A coffin will close over this body of mine. And I'll be lowered straight down into the Earth and never walk above it again. I feel my throat grunting on its own, struggling to catch the breath that I refuse to give. And Soda and Darry's laughter swirls under the crack of my door.

My lungs finally have their way with me. They force my mouth open and make me suck in all that air I'd gone without, and my brain tingles with a relaxed dizziness that I now drift across, floating on a canoe of sturdy grief and wood. Life's returned to my young body. I hold onto my pillow and wrap myself in blankets that haven't smelled like laundry in weeks.

And just like the harmonica, a sound of a faraway train is both comforting and lonesome all at once.

**A/N: **Outsiders by SE Hinton

_No point to this really, except tonight I felt the need to go back to the kind of stuff I used to write. Thanks for reading :)_


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